Thursday, October 25, 2012

Katie, the heroine of THE HALLOWED ONES, is on the verge of her Rumspringa, the time in Amish life when teenagers are free to experience non-Amish culture before officially joining the church. There are a few things that she wants to experiment with before she settles down to a quiet life as an adult Amish woman. Among them are:

5. Driving a car. Katie walks or uses her bicycle to get pretty much everywhere she wants to go. She also uses horses and buggies to get around. Katie’s curious about what it would be like to drive a car. She sees girls her age driving them on the ribbon of two-lane road behind her family’s property. She imagines that it’s both empowering and just a little bit terrifying.

4. English fashion. Plain women wear dresses that they’ve sewn themselves and forgo makeup. Katie has seen the English (non-Amish) girls her age wearing jeans in the nearby town, and she’s wandered through the drug store to play with the tubes of lipstick. She might be tempted to try some if she’s beyond the watchful eye of her parents and the community Elders. She wonders if she might even be able to pass as an English girl…

3. Falling in head-over-heels love. Katie expects that she’ll marry the neighbor boy, Elijah, when she grows up. Elijah is something of a straight arrow, and she likes him well enough. But Katie wonders what it’s like to fall in the kind of love that’s depicted in books and movies. Does it really exist? And is Elijah really the one for her?

2. Seeing the world outside. There’s a city beyond Katie’s fence that she’s never seen. On her Rumspringa, Katie intends to travel there, to see what life is like beyond her small community. But now that there are rumors of mass disappearances and contagion in the outside world, she may discover that there’s more evil beyond her fence than she ever could have imagined.

1. Coming back home to a safe place to land after her adventures. Katie’s home has always been her haven. But evil has crept into her safe community, and she may find that everything she took for granted is disintegrating.

THE HALLOWED ONES

By Laura Bickle

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Graphia

Release Date: September 25, 2012

ISBN-13: 978-0547859262

If your home was the last safe place on earth, would you let a stranger in?

Katie is on the verge of herRumspringa,the time in Amish life when teenagers can get a taste of the real world. But the real world comes to her in this dystopian tale with a philosophical bent. Rumors of massive unrest on the “Outside” abound. Something murderous is out there. Amish elders make a rule: No one goes outside, and no outsiders come in. But when Katie finds a gravely injured young man, she can’t leave him to die. She smuggles him into her family’s barn—at what cost to her community? The suspense of this vividly told, truly horrific thriller will keep the pages turning.

"This is a book to make you fear the shadows--a horrifying and gruesome tale of faith, and things that blink red eyes in the night. I began reading in the daylight, and read on into the late hours, leaning close, biting my lip. I could not look away; I was obsessed. Katie is an unbreakable soul."

--Lauren DeStefano, New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author of the Chemical Garden Trilogy

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